Civics, culture and controversy as the Salmon P. Chase Center prepares to open in fall
By Raghav Raj | Former Special Projects Reporter
“We have been building. I think we have momentum as we’re ending this semester, and then we’ll be ready to launch very strongly in the fall semester,” Lee Strang, the Chase Center’s executive director, said.
Strang said the intellectual diversity center, located in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs building, will be offering its flagship course, titled “American Civic Tradition,” for undergraduate students in the fall.
Strang said the course’s faculty instructors come from various different disciplines and, based on his perceptions of their published work, distinct political perspectives, according to prior Lantern reporting.
In an April 11 interview, Strang said he thinks approximately 10 faculty members will be on board by the fall to begin teaching these classes at the center.
Currently, however, there is no indication on who those faculty members will be. The only staff listed on the Chase Center’s website are Strang, two assistant directors, a marketing and communications manager and a project manager.
The three “American Civic Tradition” course sections offered by the center were posted in the course catalog on April 25 — over two months after the schedule of classes was first made available, before students received their appointments for enrolling, on Feb. 20.
The instructor for the course has not yet been named. “The Chase Center is identifying faculty who will teach each course and will have that process completed soon,” university spokesperson Chris Booker said in an email.
Andrew Martin, the College of Arts & Sciences’ associate dean for undergraduate education, said although it’s possible to include a class at this point in scheduling for fall, it’s also unusual for units to add courses to the books after the fall scheduling window has opened up for students.
“If a unit in ASC developed a course at this point in the semester that they wanted to include in the fall catalog, I would be supportive of that inclusion,” Martin said in an email. “Of course, I would also point out the reality is that all but incoming NFYS [new first-year students] have already registered for courses, and students are unlikely to switch their schedules.”
As of publication, the Student Information System (SIS) shows that there is one student enrolled in a section of the American Civic Traditions class.
“The American Civic Traditions classes recently became available for scheduling, and we expect enrollments to increase before the start of fall semester,” Booker said in an email.
The Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society was established by Senate Bill 117, proposed by state Sens. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) and Rob McColley (R-Napoleon), added to and passed in Ohio’s operating budget in 2023.
The law, which also established four other similar centers at Ohio public universities, aims to address the replacement of history with ideology on college campuses, according to Cirino’s statement on the Ohio Senate website.
Cirino said in that statement the bill specifically addresses “leftist ideology,” which “has a monopoly on most college campuses that is squashing intellectual diversity and punishing wrong-think and anti-woke dogma.”
“I do not believe the way to cure the leftist bias on campus is by foisting conservative ideology on academia,” Cirino said. “I believe the real fix is to ensure neutrality on the part of the instructors and administrators. Let all sides be heard. Let students decide for themselves what is true. Let free speech be preserved and protected. That is the American way. It should be taught in our universities again.”
Sen. Cirino could not be reached for comments on this article in time for publication.
Since being passed by the state legislature in 2023, the planned center has been controversial in the eyes of students and faculty at Ohio State.
In a largely symbolic vote on Jan. 23, students and staff in the University Senate voted against the introduction of the Chase Center on campus.
In March, outside the Chase Center’s first public event — a conversation between Ohio State president Ted Carter and Johns Hopkins president Ronald J. Daniels, moderated by Strang — protestors at the Ohio Union criticized the center as an undemocratic institution imposed onto Ohio State by legislators, per prior Lantern reporting.
“Very rarely do they come in from on high, plop down a whole lot of money, and then create this sort of thing. There are almost no examples,” said Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at Ohio State.
Nichols, previously the director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities from 2017 to 2022, said this level of legislative investment into an academic center makes the Chase Center a rarity in American higher education.
“It’s exceedingly rare in American higher education to have centers or institutes that have their own majors, minors and grad programs. I mean by exceedingly rare, it’s less than 1%, and a really conservative number might be a tenth of 1%,” Nichols said. “This is like a unicorn that we’ve got, or if you don’t want to call it a unicorn, it’s a center or institute that’s really, effectively like a small college.”
The Chase Center, Nichols said, is tied to what many at Ohio State see as a “broader assault on higher education” through legislation, including Senate Bill 83 — which stalled in Ohio’s House of Representatives in 2024 — and its successor, Senate Bill 1, signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine in March.
S.B. 117 and S.B. 1 have both been criticized by members of the university community as legislative actions that constrain and attempt to violate the academic freedom of Ohio State.
Strang said he understands the uncertainty around the Chase Center, but that the center’s goals are to allow for a broad array of viewpoints to work together and engage with each other.
“The Chase Center, the way that I think about it, as we’re building it out, is as a community intentionally dedicated to a wide variety of viewpoints,” Strang said. “It comes from people of different disciplinary perspectives, so I mentioned earlier, law, sociology, history. It also comes from people of all different religious worldviews, political worldviews, ideological, methodological worldviews.”
“Chase could turn out to be actually what its mission is, a kind of nonpartisan intellectual diversity center, but its origins are in a bill and a set of policies by exclusively Republican policymakers in the state who say that higher education is too far tilted to the left, that professors are indoctrinating students, that students feel like they’re being punished for their views in the classroom, and that Chase is a corrective for that,” Nichols said.
“And most faculty I know are frankly offended by that assertion. Most students I’ve talked to say that doesn’t happen.”
Faculty
According to S.B. 117, the Chase Center is required to hire 15 tenure-track faculty positions to teach under the center. These faculty members appointed may hold joint appointments within any other division in the university.
Currently, the only listed staff online for the Chase Center are Strang, assistant directors Jeremy Fortier and Johnathan Spiegler, project manager Heather Morris, and marketing and communications manager Emma Purdy.
Strang said the Center has been interviewing faculty for the hiring process since February.
“We’re bringing in faculty from all the leading institutions in America, including around the world, people who are graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, and we’re bringing them from different disciplines: history, law, political science, economics, sociology,” Strang said.
“The goal is to provide faculty who are going to give students knowledge and skills about American citizenship from those different disciplinary perspectives.”
“I’m a lawyer, and there’s lots of things that I know about the American civic tradition on the legal side, but there’s lots of things, for example, in economics, that I don’t know, and so we need to have an economist to complement what I’m going to offer to students, and the same way with history,” Strang said. “So we should have, I think, probably 10-ish faculty that will be on board by the fall to to begin teaching our classes.”
Nichols said given the ideologically-charged language within the legislation that created it, the perception is a potential ideological bias in the center’s hiring process.
“They’re trying to get us to buy into Chase — the broader faculty and staff, students to take classes, all of us — as if it’s that kind of nonpartisan ideological diversity center civics mission, but it started with the politics, and it seems kind of closed,” Nichols said. “Because the origins are in this politically charged way, the perception is that they seem to be doing the hiring process politically.”
Another issue, Nichols said, comes from the impacts that the Chase Center’s hiring process will have on departments at Ohio State that cover similar subjects related to civic thought and leadership, including the political science, economics, history and literary studies departments.
“There are many unintended consequences and possible ramifications of having Chase suddenly hire 15 tenure stream people in the next year-and-a-half, and then having them on staff potentially forever, right? And I don’t think we’ve talked about that or thought about that as a university,” Nichols said.
“If there were eight or nine early American historians over in Chase? I don’t think the history department itself would ever get to hire another early American historian. Even though we had no say in those people being hired.”
Programming
Strang said the “American Civic Tradition” course is focused on the Declaration of Independence — “this important, central document to the American civic tradition” — and critically analyzes, discusses and debates the claims and propositions made by the document.
“If we think that the Declaration is an important part of the American civic tradition — which everybody I’ve ever talked to says, ‘Yes’ — then engaging that document is an important way to help our young people become the best citizens they can be,” Strang said.
The three sections of the American Civic Tradition course — labeled CIVICTL 2100.01: Creeds, Conflicts, Cooperation, CIVICTL 2100.02: Then and Now and CIVICTL 2100.03: Foundational Debates — each focus on a variety of sources and documents interacting with the Declaration of Independence, including Abraham Lincoln, Alexis De Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers.
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Nichols said he’s particularly surprised by the idea of the Chase Center creating a major centered around “Great Books,” something that’s traditionally taught by Ohio State’s English department.
“Great books is the domain of literary studies, and that’s very clearly trampling on an area that’s already established at the university,” Nichols said. “I would think they might not teach great books in the same way in the English department. But I could foresee a battle to come about that.”
Finances
Senate Bill 117 appropriated a total $10 million in funding to be split evenly between the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years.
According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission analysis of the center’s fiscal impact and needs, “The salary and benefits for the director and faculty will be approximately $3.0 million each year. The remaining $2.0 million will support the Chase Center’s operating costs, including those for administrative staff and supplies and equipment.”
The analysis also states the funding includes anticipated one-time costs for recruiting faculty and renovating office space.
Strang said once the center is offering degree programs, he expects revenue from tuition to increase in order to accommodate the funding required to pay the 15 tenure-track faculty members the center is mandated to hire.
He said before the Center is able to pull in significant revenue from tuition, however, it looks to cultivate funding and financial support through donations and development.
“We have many other conversations right now, and I’m confident that will lead to more significant gifts in the short- and medium-term,” Strang said.
In March, Strang said the center had recieved a $3 million donation from The Stanton Foundation, a private group that advocates for informed citizens and the protection of First Amendment rights, according to its website.
The foundation’s donation will “support Chase Center scholars, conferences, events and other programs in Ohio,” Booker said in an email calling the gift a “catalyst” for such a new organization like the Chase Center.
The Stanton Foundation has also recently donated to other higher education institutions for First Amendment clinics, including $5 million for Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law in January, and $5 million for University of Georgia’s School of Law in September 2024.
Strang said beyond the Stanton Foundation’s donation, the Chase Center has also received donations and support from Ohio State alumni.
Strang said the “Liberal Arts” degree is being created in part because private donors investing money into the Chase Center have expressed an interest in the degree program.
“One of the many, many reasons to offer a liberal arts degree is that we’ve identified significant private support in the seven figure range to offer that degree,” Strang said. “And so that’s another way to enhance the revenue of the Chase Center.”
When asked if Ohio State could provide any additional background on the funders or amount of funding received by the center, Booker said “additional donations will be announced when appropriate.”
“There are many, many Americans, including many Buckeye alumni, who have two simultaneous views,” Strang said. “One: they think that higher ed is incredibly important, both to their own personal flourishing, but also to the flourishing of our state and of our nation. And, two: they think that it needs some help, some nudging, to be the best version of itself, and the civic centers are one among many ways to do that.”
Despite Nichols and other published reports that raised concerns for the center’s ability to secure long-term funding, Strang said he’s confident Ohio’s legislature will continue to allocate funds for the center to support its stated mission of addressing the replacement of history with ideology in higher education.
“Our supporters, in both the executive and legislative branches of Ohio, see Ohio higher ed as just tremendously important to the success of the state, but also in need of some help,” Strang said. “And the Chase Center is one example of that help, and so I’m confident that we’ll continue to receive support for the good work that we’re doing.”
Nichols said that, assuming that Ohio’s legislature will continue to fund the Chase Center is a dangerous assumption to make given present and potential future economic fluctuations.
“I would say you can’t assume the same level of fiscal support from the state, because you can’t assume the same economy,” Nichols said. “So you know, if the current struggles right now turn into a recession or a depression, lots of discretionary funding is going to go.”
Nichols said that the state is pouring money into a center to address an issue that fundamentally doesn’t really exist, and isn’t as important to students as concerns over debt and the job market.
“For me, the perceived problems or the alleged problems of indoctrination and punishment of students don’t hold water,” Nichols said. “And so they don’t amount to the need for a multimillion dollar, enormous new structure to deal with it.”
The story was updated to delete an objection from a source that the hiring process at the Chase Center lacked interdepartmental transparency. The source’s statement was made on April 1, before he attended a faculty interview on April 22.
University spokesman Chris Booker said “Members of the Department of History attended seven interviews. More than 30 faculty from a variety of disciplines were invited to participate in the Center’s interviews, many of whom did so. Finally, the hiring committee included faculty from Arts & Sciences, the Glenn College of Public Affairs, and the Moritz College of Law.”